Surrealism and Escapism:  The Stories of a Dreamer Part 1 tells the first part of a story of a fine artist photographer who conveys her own narratives to create a new sense of herself.  Many of our traumas, problems, likes, and dislikes, freeze into solid reality manifesting itself into our beliefs, behaviours, and personalities without even realising.  The solidification of these factors means that humans tend to create one set personality, one persona, and one identity over many years. This leads one’s personality to become rigid and ‘set in stone’.  Naturally, having a solid identity is not necessarily harmful to one’s creative output. However, for others it can be a hindrance and a block to one’s creativity.

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My intention through this project is to tell the story of a photographer as she breaks her own rigid personality, which has been built up over a period of twenty-seven years.  It was helpful to me to consider this narrative as if looking through a mirror.  The word mirror is taken from the Latin 'Mirare' and 'Mirari', meaning to look at and to wonder/admire at. In choosing to tell my story I decided enough was enough, and it was time to look myself in the mirror and begin a process of rescanning myself to formulate a new identity characterised by my personal choices and stripped of my past circumstances which had moulded me.  I was effectively going to rearrange the image in the mirror and reconstitute myself as a new identity.

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The project is in four sections. The first section unearths and explores my insidious drive to maintain the ‘perfect me’ (Perfectionism).  The second section explores my fear of loss of personality and my desperate need to hang on and preserve my ‘old’ identity (Preservation).  The third section explores how I set out to experiment and embrace different identities in order to integrate and embrace them, to accept myself (Integration).  Finally, the fourth section explores how I purge myself by bringing to the front my raw emotions and persona in a process of weakening and destroying. (Distortion and Destruction).

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The following images are a series of fictional ‘identities’ developed from my face captured originally from a photograph taken on my smartphone.  These ‘faces’ were edited to create a series of different portraits using ‘FaceApp’ and ‘Gradient’, facial recognition AI apps.  These apps showed me how my face might look reimagined as if of various different nationalities and genders.  These portraits clearly illustrate how disturbingly easy it is to change one's persona. They also demonstrate how powerful advanced facial recognition and image editing technology can be without any necessary professional skills. 

Working through these four phases of the project enabled me as if to pass through a ‘fiery furnace’ in order to burn and clear away obstacles, hinderances, and personal ‘baggage’ focussed on my perceived flaws, that no longer served me anymore.